Despite herself, Mouse’s gaze flickered up to meet that of her mistress.
“Didn’t you?” the Speaker repeated, and her eyes searched Mouse’s face, revealing nothing in turn.
“I—” Mouse faltered, then stopped.
“You did,” said the Speaker, as though deciding the shape of the universe once and for all; let no god or goddess try to contradict her. “You hid. But you are here now. And you are my loyal little Mouse, and you will serve me now, at the end.”
Then the Speaker turned from Mouse and gave a sharp word of command. Slaves came forward and scurrying acolytes, none of whom looked Mouse’s way. “Come, child,” said the high priestess without looking around. “Take up my train. The time of Fireword’s waking has come at last. I want you beside me.”
So Mouse took up her mistress’s train as commanded and progressed from the high priestess’s rooms out to the pillared hall where all the priestesses and their slaves had gathered with unlit torches, gaudy in their finery. Even the eunuchs, their weapons polished, wore finer clothing than Mouse had ever seen them in.
Then she saw the scrubber.
He stood in the center of it all, humble and slouching, ugly in his servant’s garb amid the splendor of the Citadel worshippers. He kept his face lowered, and at first Mouse wondered if he had the grace to be ashamed. Then she saw—though she wondered later if she had seen it right—that his head was bent because, of all things, he was trying to disguise a smile.
The Speaker approached, towing Mouse in her wake.
“The time has come,” she said. Of the two, the Speaker and Etanun, it was she who appeared immortal. She was so tall and so beautiful, and one had to look closely to see the scars of burns on her dark skin. The scrubber, by contrast, was as dirtbound as a man could be.
He looked up at the Speaker, and his eyes twinkled. “So it would seem,” he said.
To Mouse’s surprise, he spoke her language. Not the Faerie language she was growing accustomed to hearing translate in her head. No, he spoke the language of her people as naturally as though he had been born and raised in this country.
It was the first time in she could not guess how long that she had heard her own speech pass the lips of a man.
The Speaker recoiled, offense etching her face. “It is now two hundred years, Murderer, since you earned yourself that title.”
The scrubber shrugged. “So glad I got here at last. Wouldn’t want to miss an event such as this!”
Mouse thought the Speaker would slap the old man. Her face revealed a struggle. Instead, she turned, the gold-edged braids of her wig swinging about her shoulders. “The will of the goddess!” she cried to the assembly. “The will of the Fire. We go into the Dark to retrieve the Light.”
“The will of the Fire!” replied her loyal cohorts as one voice, and the silent eunuchs raised their spears.
Mouse felt a chill down her spine, as though something dreadful reached out to her from behind, drawing her attention. Holding up the end of her mistress’s train, she looked back over her shoulder at the scrubber, her former master, and his foolish old face.
Their eyes locked.
And suddenly, without a word passing between them, Mouse knew what she must do.
The moment Alistair crossed the cave’s threshold, shadows pressed in around him, thick and palpable. This was a different darkness than even the dank air of the secret passage. This was much more like the family crypt of Gaheris castle.
Alistair descended, taking firm strides to disguise to himself how his heart quaked with dread. He would not think of Mouse. He would not think of the sword, or kingship, or even of the Chronicler. He must concentrate entirely on making himself take each step.
Blood calls to blood, so the legends say, especially on the Path to Death, where the ties of kinship are all that yet link the dead to the living.
“Well,” Alistair whispered, his voice catching in his throat, “let’s hope the legends know what they’re talking about.”
The first few minutes seemed more horrible to him than blindness or death. But this was the world where the dead and living meet, and a confused half-light filled Alistair’s eyes. Somehow, this was worse than utter darkness. He could almost see but not quite, and that bewildered him. Sometimes he felt his feet descending a steep, slippery slope, and he heard the skittering of loose pebbles as he kicked them free.
But sometimes he thought his feet trod a firm stairway, each step carefully formed to match its brothers. His going was easier then.
Blood calls to blood.
The thought went round in his head. How? he wondered. It would be one thing if, like the Brothers Ashiun, he felt some real sense of kinship with the man who was his cousin. But he didn’t. The Chronicler was his teacher, his antagonist, a dry and disapproving entity whom Alistair had always ignored when he could. He scarcely knew him, when it came down to it.